


Duplicity

by Sororising



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Ambiguous/Open Ending, Emotional, F/F, Mild AoS spoilers, Self-Discovery, This is very hard to tag
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-22
Updated: 2016-11-22
Packaged: 2018-09-01 10:52:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,087
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8621707
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sororising/pseuds/Sororising
Summary: She feels like her awareness has been extended far beyond the capacity of a single mind, so that some part of her is aware of five steps at once, of ten eyes blinking in unison, of the harmony of so many movements spiralling around each other, movements that don’t need to be predicted because they’re already known, movements that fit together without a single discordant note, building and building and never crashing back to earth.She never imagined she could feel like this. This powerful. This connected.This loved.





	

**Author's Note:**

> This fic is for a prompt that came about as a result of my [Femslash November](http://sororising.tumblr.com/post/152548262723/femslash-november) challenge. This was the original prompt: 'Would you be willing to do a fic about Alisha (the inhuman from AoS) and how she falls in love with herself? Both literally - as in one of her duplicates - but also as a form of self-confidence.'
> 
> And it turned out to be absolutely fascinating to write. I haven't played with language like I did here in a while; I got sidetracked by quantum physics; I started thinking up all these existential questions about identity - basically, this was a really, really interesting prompt, anon, and I hope I've managed to do it justice.
> 
> Anyone that knows Alisha's plotline in Agents of Shield will know it's a hard one to end happily, so I have kept this as more of a character study rather than a play-by-play of the plot, though certain events are included. The ending is quite a vague one as a result of this, but hopefully that works.

Knowing others is intelligence; knowing yourself is true wisdom.  
Mastering others is strength; mastering yourself is true power.  
-Tao te Ching, by Lao Tzu

* * *

How many people truly know themselves?

How many can face every single flaw, every crack in the facade they present to the world, and accept each one?

How many people can look themselves in the eye?

Literally.

Alisha holds her hand up, as though she’s about to touch a mirror, and the woman standing in front of her echoes the movement. They touch their fingertips together, and Alisha feels like something inside her that she hadn’t even known was broken is healing itself, knitting back together like a wound left open too long.

Reflections can be misinterpreted. This can’t.

She has a clone. This is what Terrigenesis has done to her. What it’s given her.

Except - it isn’t even a clone, is it? Or _she_ isn’t, rather. A clone could develop its own personality, given time and a few environmental factors. 

This is her. In duplicate.

She feels that wrenching sensation cascade through her body again, and she steps back only to see - oh.

Her in _triplicate,_ then. How many of these things are there going to be?

Four, it turns out. And her.

Her mind is spinning so much that it takes her a few moments to realise that she can feel them, connected to her, four silent - for now - presences that have suddenly made themselves known inside her brain.

It should feel invasive. Like she’s been splintered into fractions, sliced and spliced into pieces of her former self.

She feels the exact opposite. She feels as though she’s complete, in a way she hadn’t known she ever could be.

Her heart won’t stop racing, and distantly she thinks she can feel the new heartbeats, thrumming insistently in her chest; like faraway footsteps might, keeping time with her own. She wonders if they know that they’re the doubles. Maybe every one of them has the same thoughts going through their minds right now.

How does she know she’s the original?

She shakes herself. This won’t get her anywhere. She needs to talk to someone who knows about things like this; someone who believes in the extraordinary.

Before she even begins to wonder if the duplicates will go back inside her again, she feels them sliding back, slotting into place until it’s only her again, one body that somehow feels insufficient now - oh, but it _isn’t_ just her, she realises a moment later. They’re there, still, present yet unseen, watching the world through eyes that no longer belong only to her.

She should really talk to someone about this.

* * *

Jiaying understands. And doesn’t judge; in fact, she thinks it’s a wonderful development. Alisha hadn’t known until then how afraid she’d been of the judgement. This isn’t a _curse._ It’s a gift she would never, ever have thought to ask for. And she already knows she would fight to the death if anyone ever tried to take it away.

“Train with them,” Jiaying tells her. “Train with them until they become extensions of yourself.”

Alisha nods and agrees, as five voices sing together inside her mind.

_They already are._

* * *

Communicating with - with _them_ is the strangest task she’s ever set herself. It’s both utterly instinctive - she can think _I should get that done today,_ only to find that before the thought’s even completed one of her duplicates is already there to help.

That doesn’t mean everything is easy. While communicating with every duplicate at once is as simple as thinking to herself is, singling one of them out for specific instructions - or suggestions, because she isn’t sure she likes the idea of her ordering them around - is tricky at first.

“I should give you names,” she says out loud one day. Except - how could that possibly work? They appear wearing whatever she’s wearing, and it’s not like there’s anything in particular that could distinguish one from another.

They only thing that might work would be numbers, and she hates that thought as soon as it occurs to her. They aren’t animals, or objects. People shouldn’t have _numbers._

 _We are Alisha,_ one of them answers inside her head, and when she shivers it isn’t entirely from the strangeness of it all. _We already have a name._

“Okay,” she says, realising even as she does so how unnecessary speaking out loud is.

_Okay._

“I’m - I feel closer to them than I’ve ever felt to anything in my life,” Alisha tells Jiaying later, but even that seems like an understatement.

It isn’t _closeness,_ to feel so connected to duplicates of your own self, because _closeness_ still implies some infinitesimal separation between one and another. 

She wonders if she will ever, ever find the words to explain this. Maybe if she studied quantum mechanics for a decade. The way certain particles can occupy more than one space at a time, the way physics can bend and rearrange itself at a level far beyond what humanity can comprehend.

“I understand,” Jiaying says, in that calm, inscrutable voice that Alisha knows hides steel under its surface. “You must take care. Having one of them die would feel like having a part of yourself ripped away.”

“It would,” is all Alisha can say, and she goes back to her quarters, feeling like there’s a numbness creeping into every inch of her body at the thought.

She lets them out, suddenly needing to know that they’re still with her. She knows they are; every second of every day, she feels their presence. But she needs to see them.

 _Do you feel trapped?_ she tries to ask. _When you aren’t -_

When they aren’t free. 

She can’t think of a way to put it that doesn’t sound terrible, like she’s only storing them away somewhere until she needs them.

She starts keeping them with her more often, and not just for training. It helps, she thinks; soon they barely need to communicate in the way most humans - most _people,_ she corrects herself fiercely - would think of it.

Especially when they’re fighting. There are no words, then, no cries to _watch out_ or _behind you._ As soon as one of them knows something, so do the others; so does Alisha.

They could be the most effective team in the world, she thinks to herself, and she isn’t sure if the feeling she gets at that thought is closer to fear or to excitement.

* * *

Experiments show that she _is_ the one in control, that if she loses consciousness then they all fade back inside her, waiting for her to awaken.

She knows that, rationally, but that isn’t always how it feels. Sometimes it’s as though there’s five of her, all capable of interacting and acting separately, but still communicating constantly, letting the others know where they are with the same sort of automatic reflex that makes someone take breath into their lungs. 

Those times are usually when one duplicate is talking to someone while another is performing a different task, or when they’re separated by a larger physical distance than they’re used to.

She doesn’t like those times.

On other occasions, she feels like one person split into five pieces, one consciousness stretched between different bodies and brains - especially when she - when they fight.

God, they’re so _beautiful_ when they fight.

Twist and spin and kick and whirl and - it’s like a dance, in so many ways. A mesmerising ballet, where each movement flows into the next with the fluidity that can only come from knowing your partners as well as you know yourself.

Sometimes Alisha just watches, as the four duplicates train together. She doesn’t think she could ever get tired of it, of the way they work as one being. 

_Proprioception,_ she thinks, to herself and to her selves. It’s the way your mind senses where to move without having to look each time, the way your body knows how its limbs will reach out and fold back again without knowing _how_ it knows.

She feels like her awareness has been extended far beyond the capacity of a single mind, so that some part of her is aware of five steps at once, of ten eyes blinking in unison, of the harmony of so many movements spiralling around each other, movements that don’t need to be predicted because they’re already known, movements that fit together without a single discordant note, building and building and never crashing back to earth.

It should be overwhelming. It is, in a lot of ways.

But it’s so, so much more than that.

She never imagined she could feel like this. This powerful. This connected.

This _loved._

* * *

She used to have insecurities. Of course she did; who doesn’t? And yet somehow they seem to have faded, over the past few weeks and months. In some cases, they’ve disappeared entirely.

It just - it seems so absurd, to worry about such trivialities, in the face of something like this.

It’s difficult to care about any kind of physical flaw when you can see yourself, reflected and yet standing alone, connected to you in the most intimate way you can imagine. 

She loves her duplicates, and she knows they love her - how could they not?

It would be a disservice to them, surely, to dislike her own body, when it no longer belongs to only her.

And as for her other flaws, her jealousy, her occasional flares of temper, the way she sometimes holds grudges for too long - well, they all get examined and accepted, five times over.

There’s a quiet, almost inevitable surety in her thoughts now. She has been judge and judged, jury and witness, and she has not been found wanting. Her every action is considered in new lights, now, and she knows that no matter what she does, she has companions who will never turn their backs on her. Not because they can’t, though she supposes that must be true as well.

Because they _won’t._

She will never be lonely again.

* * *

She draws herself away from the other Inhumans at Afterlife, more often than not. It isn’t that she dislikes them. She doesn’t trust them all, but she offers advice to Jiaying when asked, and she guards Raina, and passes important information to those who need it when requested to do so - she’s especially useful for that, of course; she can quite literally do the work of five other people.

So she doesn’t quite avoid the others, but nor does she seek them out. Why should she want to? She has everything she needs alongside her, within her, at every moment of every day.

She can’t think of anything she could want more.

It’s just her and one duplicate, one night, because she’d wanted a quiet kind of company, and who better than herself to fill that space?

She wonders if it’s the same one who she’d seen first, the one who had pressed her hand to her own hand, in a beautifully twisted parody of a mirror.

 _It is,_ comes the answer, and Alisha laughs out loud. The sound startles her, for a second. She spends so much time inside her head, these days, or communicating silently with the other parts of herself. Unexpected noises startle her, jarring her from the introspective interactions that soothe her mind in a way nothing else can.

And yet she still falls into her old thoughts now and again, though the times when she does are growing further and further apart. Her _human_ thoughts. She forgets, sometimes, that any question she asks inside her head with be met with an almost simultaneous answer. Often she doesn’t even need to think; new knowledge just arrives in her head and carves itself a place as though it had always been there.

It feels like the most natural process imaginable, and the dissonance between that and the knowledge that to anyone else it would sound like the most alien idea in the world makes her laugh again.

Inside her head, this time, where it rings back at her in echoes that take a long, long time to fall into silence.

The duplicate that’s with her - how funny, Alisha had once thought of _naming_ them, as though they could ever be something as banal and human as siblings - tilts her head. 

Alisha leans forward and touches her lips to -

To her lips.

She gasps, once, because she can’t quite believe she’s doing this; she’s adjusted to so much, but this is beyond anything else, surely, this is - this - 

This is magic.

It’s barely a kiss, really. 

But she can feel it as though she’s both instigator and recipient, can feel every thought passing through two minds until she doesn’t know which ones were her own to begin with, doesn’t know if there even is a _her_ anymore. 

Her eyes are open still, and so are her eyes, an endless corridor of iris-mirrors between them, and they blink at the exact same moment so the link stays unbroken.

Their breathing falls effortlessly into a perfect counterpoint. Alisha breathes in as her duplicate breathes out, as though they’re truly mirror images, completing each other in an infinity of ways. 

She draws back. 

She doesn’t say anything, either out loud or in her head, because she doesn’t need to. Right now, she has no idea where she ends and another of her selves begins, and nor does she want to. There’s no communication _between_ them, because everything they’re thinking is thought together, shared and sharing, in this one shining, blissful instant of connection.

It’s the most incredible feeling in the world.

* * *

_Having one of them die would feel like having a part of yourself ripped away,_ Jiaying had told her.

It doesn’t feel like that, she learns later, as Lash attacks without mercy. Not at all.

It feels like exactly what it is. Like her _whole_ self has been torn out of her, for one wrenching, rending moment that goes on for an eternity inside her mind.

She feels the pain as though she’s trapped inside an echo chamber with it, as though every time it travels between her bodies - because that’s what they are, really, one person with five bodies - it’s magnified, again and again, echoing from original to duplicate until she’s both and neither at once, caught in an endless cycle of agony until - until -

And this is worse than agony, Alisha knows, as she feels one of her lives leave her forever. So much worse.

She’s crying out with four voices, every one of her hearts is breaking, and she doesn’t know if she - they - can ever find the strength to stand up again after this.

* * *

They do. Of course they do.

Alisha has always been resilient; she prides herself on that. And yes, a part of her died - _you died,_ a voice whispers in her mind, and she listens to it, and tells it to be quiet - but that doesn’t mean she has nothing left to live for.

That _they_ have nothing left to live for.

The SHIELD agents don’t know what to make of her. She knows that without needing to ask. They might not all be human, but their ways of thinking are still too limited to fully understand what she’s become.

They can’t help it. Their minds try to fit things into boxes that make sense to them. Twins. Clones. Illusions.

She is so much more than any concept. She is no longer just a _she,_ and that seems to be beyond their comprehension. She doesn’t try to help them see. Why should she?

This belongs to nobody but her, and to the three others that remain. 

She will protect them, as they protect her, instinctively, without hesitation. Without mercy, if it comes to that.

They are the only ones who can understand one another, and so the only ones that can understand her. She had known, from the moment they first appeared, that she could never give them up willingly.

But back then it had been a desire to keep them that had made her feel that way. Things are different now, now that she knows what the loss of one of her selves feels like.

She still could never give them up, of course. But now she means that in the most literal sense possible. They are entwined, wrapped around one another in every way they can be. 

A symbiotic union. Intimacy inviolate and irrevocable, a love that humans would never even think to dream of.

 _They shall not tear us asunder,_ Alisha thinks fiercely, and she knows there is a wildness in her eyes that will never again lie dormant.

* * *

It’s ironic, really, that _duplicitous_ means someone who can’t be trusted, someone who manipulates, who conceals and hides aspects of their true nature.

How strange, to think of that, when Alisha’s duplicates have made her nothing but unflinchingly honest with herself. There is no concealment when you share a body, no disguise that can shield your thoughts from someone who shares your mind.

And why would she want there to be?

It’s becoming difficult for her to remember the days when she was the only one. When she was alone. 

Both because they feel so long ago, after everything that’s happened since, and because when she tries, she feels a hum of pain echo through her consciousness. She doesn’t want to press too hard. They’ve all been through enough, after all. More than enough.

Was she truly alone, back then? Or were her selves always inside her, biding their time, waiting for the day she would unlock them?

There are some questions she knows will never be answered, no matter how many papers she reads on quantum field theory and wave-particle duality.

Maybe there are some questions that should never be asked in the first place.

In the liminal spaces where their thoughts combine, in the haze where she is neither one nor another, she lets herself sink down.

How many people truly know themselves?

How many can face every single flaw, every crack in the facade they present to the world, and accept each one?

How many people can look at their self, at the myriad of quirks and qualms and doubts and desires that make up their being, and never once wish to turn away?

Alisha smiles, and within herself she feels an endless reflection, a wave of joy that can crest forever without breaking, singing itself back and forth, from mirror to mind to mirror.

**Author's Note:**

> This is why I take prompts, because they push me to write things I could never think of. Anon, I hope you enjoyed this, I loved writing it.
> 
> Feedback and concrit is always welcome.


End file.
